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Tegile boots Dell array out of chemical biz. Dell responds: Tegile, who?

Upstart says it's up, up and away ... but not on the giants' radar – yet

Blocks and Files Hybrid array maker Tegile has kicked a Dell box out of chemical distributor Hawkins, the storage upstart claims, by replacing a Compellent array with one of its own systems.

Tegile says this indicates the power of modern hybrid flash-disk arrays over traditional SANs. Tegile has also replaced a slow FlexPod system at another customer.

Hawkins was suffering storage performance issues with its JD Edwards Enterprise One ERP app when the Compellent array was installed and, eventually, had a Tegile array installed for a proof-of-concept test, we're told. It turned out to be a great customer reference.

The Compellent array maxed out at around 6,000 IOPS but the Tegile Zebi hit 35,000, meaning more servers and users could be supported. Hawkins liked the better management tools too: the Zebi software reported what the actual load was, where bottlenecks were occurring, and how many IOPs were being achieved.

Hawkins' director of IT Jeff Buelt said: "Two weeks into the proof of concept, I called back and said, ‘You’re not taking it back. Let me know what my cost is and what I need to do to purchase this.'"

Tegile's marketing VP Rob Commins put out the sort of canned quote you would expect: "We continue to see a large number of companies making the switch from Compellent to Tegile ... we have been able to provide significant savings from a storage utilisation, performance to dollar ratio and maintenance perspective.”

Is Dell seeing a Tegile onslaught? Spokesperson Lon Levitan told The Register: "We are not running into this company [Tegile] in the field. We now have Dell Compellent and EqualLogic arrays in more than 73,000 customer sites globally."

Tegile also says its customer Grass Valley replaced a FAS2240-based FlexPod system at its Hillsboro, Oregon, engineering centre to support its virtual infrastructure. With the Flexpod system, performance and latency issues resulted from the growth of VMs on NFS. This gave Tegile its "in" to Grass Valley, which looked at offerings from EMC, Isilon and Hitachi before picking a Tegile HA2300 that cost the same but was 10 times faster, we're told.

We don't know if Hawkins tried a hybrid or all-flash Compellent, ditto Grass Valley with a flashed-up FAS2240, but this story, to us, is indicative of the inroads Nimble Storage, Tintri and Tegile seem to be making into mainstream storage vendors' customer bases. Because these three have relatively small channels, their visibility at the top of the incumbents' execs is low to non-existent, and their overall impact on the incumbents' revenues are low as well.

Yet, given these kinds of customer stories and the hybrid upstarts growth rates, the three hybrideers look likely to carve off chunks of the incumbents' business, and there has to be a response as the incumbents' revenues take a hit. ®

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